so ive been using an RTL-SDR v3 dongle for about a year now, mostly listening to airband and some amateur stuff, occasionally poking around on 40m with it and SDR# on the laptop. works fine honestly but i keep reading that the dynamic range is pretty limited and ive definitely noticed it gets stomped on bad when theres strong signals nearby, like there's a pager transmitter about 2 miles from me and it just wrecks everything in a wide chunk of spectrum.

anyway been looking at upgrading and the two things im actually considering are the SDRplay RSP1A (usually see it around $110 or so) and the HackRF One which is more like $300-350 for a legit one from Great Scott Gadgets. i know the HackRF can transmit which is sort of interesting but im not sure i actually need that, mostly i just want better reception sensitivity and to get rid of the blocking issue. someone on reddit mentioned the RSP1A has hardware filtering but i dont really understand how that helps practically.

does anyone actually use both of these or has compared them side by side? the specs sheets dont really tell me what i want to know about real world use. running SDR# mostly but ive played with SDRangel a bit and that crashed constantly so i gave up on it

Had both at the same time for a while actually. The RSP1A will blow the RTL dongle out of the water for what you're describing — the preselection filters make a huge difference when you've got strong interferers. The HackRF's receiver side is honestly not that impressive compared to the SDRplay, the noise figure is worse and it shows. Where the HackRF wins is the transmit capability and the wider tuning range going all the way up past 6 GHz, but if receive performance is your main thing the RSP1A is the better buy by a fair margin.

The SDRangel crashing thing, yeah that happened to me too on Windows, switched to Linux and it's been rock solid. Worth trying if you have a spare machine or can dual boot. Also if you go SDRplay route, their own software SDRuno is decent and plays well with it but you can also use it with SDR# with the right plugin, though last i checked that plugin was getting a bit stale.

rsp1a is what i'd get in your situation, no question. hackrf is more of a tinkerers tool, great if you want to do stuff like replay attacks on garage doors or mess with weather satellite uplinks on the transmit side, but the rx performance leaves something to be desired compared to a dedicated receive-only SDR at that price range. you're basically paying for the tx and the wide coverage.

one thing nobody mentions is the SDRplay has pretty good driver support and the API is stable, ive had zero issues running it under gqrx on linux which is what i mostly use. the rtl-sdr community is huge so theres more random software floating around for that ecosystem but the RSP stuff is solid enough that it doesnt really matter